A new tower in Milan is being billed not as a skyscraper, but as a vertical forest:

They say it only adds 5% to construction costs, which I imagine would easily be recouped through the premium in rent this tower would surely get. They also say that to provide the same amount of vegetation at sprawl-level density would require 50,000 sq meters of land.

I think it’s a really interesting idea, and I hope it works, but the practicalities of managing this seem to say it won’t. I mean, are you going to plant trees by helicopter when one dies? And, is that cost acceptable for the benefit of having this“living architecture”? What do you think?